Rep. Ted Poe: a colorful Texas congressman who speaks his mind &#151 and often

A Houston-area congressman is making more speeches on more subjects than almost any of his 434 colleagues in the House of Representatives.

Official photo

Rep. Ted Poe

Rep. Ted Poe unleashed 30 floor speeches in the opening legislative days of the new Congress, sustaining the rapid fire pace that has enabled him to deliver almost 700 speeches on the House floor since he took office in 2005.

“The people of Southeast Texas can’t come up here and do it, so I speak for them,” explains the 62-year-old former Harris County prosecutor and criminal court judge. “I’m their lawyer, I’m their advocate, and I just believe it’s my responsibility to be on the House floor talking about all these things.”

Most recently, the Republican from Humble accused the Environmental Protection Agency of morphing into the “dust police” with regulations on air pollution from churning farm equipment.

He said lawmen let Jessica Rene Tata slip through their fingers to reach Nigeria before a criminal investigation was completed into a fire at her day care facility in Houston that killed four toddlers.

He belittled the administration’s claims of improved border security. And he decried sexual assaults in the armed forces.

“I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but ‘diplomat’ has never been one of them,” says the lanky University of Houston law graduate.

The only other House member who comes close to Poe’s prolific speechmaking is fellow Houston-area Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a nine-term Democrat who shares few of Poe’s political views.

“I applaud Ted Poe,” says Jackson Lee. “He uses his voice to speak to the issues that he and his constituents care about.”

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Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

Poe long ago shunned “the old rule of power accumulation in Washington &#151 to be seen and not heard,” says Larry Sabato, political scientist and author of Essentials of American Government: Roots and Reform. “He has an unusual approach, not because of the speeches themselves but because they are so numerous.”

Some say the high profile may have prevented Poe from moving up the ladder in Washington, where backroom deals outside the limelight are the bread and butter of Capitol Hill.

Rice University political scientist Robert Stein, for example, says Poe’s spending requests &#151 $7.1 million in personally requested earmarks and $48.9 million requested in collaboration with other lawmakers &#151 put him squarely in the middle of the pack.

“I see no evidence that the congressman has become a major player in the legislative arena,” says Stein.

In many ways, Poe never left his law-enforcement roots. He speaks with the clarity and quiet authority of a presiding judge. His speeches ring with the conviction and eloquence of the closing arguments that he used to win every single jury trial he prosecuted during eight years as a Harris county prosecutor.

His search for “common sense solutions” recalls his courtroom efforts to pioneer public punishments. He sentenced murderers to keep photographs of victims on their cell walls, shoplifters to wear signs outside pilfered stores and sex offenders to post warning signs in their yards.

Poe brought some of that creativity to Capitol Hill, his supporters say.

“He just never drank the party Kool-Aid when he came to Congress,” says DeeAnn Thigpen, who worked for Poe for six years before joining chemical giant Lyondell-Basell Industries. “The congressman’s approach has always been to find a new way, a creative solution.”

Poe’s congressional office brims with reminders of his law enforcement career. A 3-foot toothbrush leans in a corner, awarded by fellow prosecutors to memorialize his practice of theatrically sliding a toothbrush across the defense table as he told the accused that he or she would need it in the state penitentiary.

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Rep. Ted Poe speaking on Capitol Hill

Photographs of two murdered children share space with iconic portraits of Poe’s heroes, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Army Maj. Gen. George Patton and President Teddy Roosevelt.

Poe convicted the killers of 14-month-old Kevin Wanstrath and sent two of them to death row. The congressman also displays a photograph of Jessica Lunsford, a 9-year-old kidnap-murder victim whose death propelled him to win congressional approval for a federal registry to track sex offenders across state lines.

“For me, personally, baby killing &#151 there’s nothing worse,” says Poe, the father of four and grandfather of eight.

A sixth-generation Texan, Poe says he draws his commitment to victims in part from the death of his maternal grandfather, Ted Hill, who was killed by a drunken driver in the early 1950s while laying asphalt for the Texas Highway Department.

Poe routinely supports the House GOP leadership. But he has an independent streak as well, breaking ranks most recently to press for the last veteran of World War I to lie in repose in the Capitol Rotunda.

Despite a career built upon his powers of persuasion, Poe fondly recalls one case he never won: Convincing his maternal grandmother Lucy in 1981 that running as a Republican was respectable.

“She was a Yellow Dog Democrat and proud of it,” recalls Poe, who frequently visited her in Temple during his undergraduate days at Abilene Christian University. “The more I talked, the madder she got. Finally she just cut me off and said, ‘You were raised better.’ ”

The GOP subsequently helped Poe win six elections as a criminal court judge and four elections to Congress.

“She even mentioned to me that she wasn’t sure I could go to heaven if I were a Republican,” Poe said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”